Uko ukubita kenshi u Rwanda niko rurushaho gukomera - Perezida Kagame
Transcript
00:00 (gentle music)
00:02 - I went to Yale University.
00:11 I was invited to speak there.
00:15 The audience was big.
00:27 The discussion was good.
00:29 There are exchanges of views and so on and so forth.
00:35 Later on, I read something written by somebody,
00:44 I think, who works and maybe lives at Yale.
00:55 A well-educated person, maybe a very good student,
01:00 or supposedly so, of history.
01:10 But later on, I saw something written online
01:25 talking about my presentation at Yale.
01:30 But what was said in this piece
01:40 could not be farther from the truth
01:44 of what I actually said.
01:52 For that person, he summarized what I said by saying,
01:56 I talked about the history of Rwanda,
01:59 the context, and everything.
02:03 And for him, he chose to summarize it by saying,
02:11 Rwanda, Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame,
02:18 told the audience, and through his speech,
02:23 was telling the rest of the world
02:29 that they should mind their own business.
02:36 That they have nothing to do with the affairs of Rwanda.
02:45 (audience laughing)
02:48 Apart from that not being correct,
02:53 I didn't see anything close to that.
02:56 But when I kept examining it,
03:01 I actually said, maybe I should have said it.
03:06 (audience laughing)
03:10 (audience applauding)
03:13 What's actually wrong with telling people
03:21 to mind their own business?
03:23 I think we should all be minding our own business.
03:27 (audience laughing)
03:30 (audience laughing)
03:33 And in fact, it is something that I was reminded of
03:44 because minding other people's business,
03:51 their own business,
03:56 may be in itself a very bad culture.
04:00 Or if you want to do that,
04:06 why don't you do it?
04:11 Why don't you have a conversation
04:13 with the people
04:17 for whom it is their business?
04:25 And then they will welcome you
04:29 and you can be part of minding their business.
04:35 But I could see where this person is coming from
04:43 and it is part of the problem
04:47 we are seeing across the world.
04:54 People ignoring that,
04:59 or some people ignoring that others,
05:03 based on their culture, on their history,
05:08 on their context,
05:09 on their values,
05:15 they are people
05:22 who actually want to mind their own business.
05:26 So what I forgot to tell you that was important
05:30 when I was
05:32 answering this reader and a good friend of mine saying,
05:40 I told him, I said,
05:46 "With this kind of suffering people have had
05:51 "or the kind of pressures from outside
05:54 "and the beating and everything."
06:00 I gave him an example
06:02 of, people know there's a plant,
06:08 this plant called the siso, you know siso?
06:11 From which you get,
06:13 is a fiber that forms very tough strings
06:20 and tough ropes are made out of that.
06:24 It's a plant, siso.
06:26 S-I-S-A-L.
06:29 It's grown a lot in some African countries,
06:36 mainly Tanzania and so on.
06:38 I said, "Rwandans,
06:43 "based on our culture
06:49 "and the desire to fight for our dignity,
06:53 "the analogy would be like,
06:57 "you know siso, siso before you get
07:02 "very tough ropes out of that.
07:04 "It is crushed and heat and beaten
07:10 "and every beating,
07:13 "you get these very strong,
07:16 "very tough ropes come out of it."
07:20 So, the more and the harder you beat Rwanda,
07:25 you get these.
07:30 (audience applauding)
07:33 What comes out is,
07:41 these people who really want to
07:48 give it back to you,
07:51 want to push back,
07:55 want to say, "Wait a minute, let's have a discussion."
08:01 Or, "It's going to be hard
08:06 "to just bow to you
08:10 "because it's not where we belong."
08:16 (audience applauding)
08:19 (gentle music)
08:23 (gentle music)
08:25 (electronic music)